New Humour and Masculinity at the Fin de Siècle

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-3-032-08972-4
Verlag: Springer

Buch, Englisch, 225 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 421 g

This book explores the popular writing of the New Humourists and their vital engagement with late Victorian conceptions of manliness. Accused by their critics of lowness and inconsequentiality, these works act as literary mediations of a lower middle-class urban masculinity, revolving around ideas of office work, urban modernity, and adventure narratives. This will be situated in the context of white-collar work at the end of the century, and competing ideas of the urban man and mass. The book argues that a quartet of New Humour writers, Jerome K. Jerome, Israel Zangwill, Barry Pain, and Robert Barr, formed a coherent creative group whose fiction acknowledges and subverts stereotypes about clerks and urban enervation ,evokes and mocks ideas of adventure and imperial masculinity, and engages with the nature and function of humour. It looks at how ideas of mechanicality, from Henri Bergson, allow us to examine how humour articulates Victorian definitions and redefinitions of manliness. New Humour works as a crucial focal point for intersecting fin de siècle ideas of masculinity, class and national fitness. This work demonstrates that the literature of the New Humourists examines wider intersecting concerns clustering around ideas of masculinity. In doing so, this study complicates and re-defines how we should look at Victorian conceptions of gender and humour.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ibitson, David A.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Tanz Kleinkunst, Kabarett, Varieté, Zirkus
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The New Humour.- Chapter 3: Clerkish Men.- Chapter 4: Clerkish Doubles.- Chapter 5: Imperial Parody.- Chapter 6: Urban Exploration.-  Chapter 7: Conclusion Comic Writing and Modernity.

Über Autor(innen)

David A. Ibitson is a Teaching Fellow in Arts and Humanities at the Lifelong Learning Centre, University of Leeds, UK. He has written on Jerome K. Jerome, music hall culture, Victorian youth programmes,1830s Newgate novels, the ghost stories of M.R. James, office work and nineteenth-century gothic literature. Current research interests include Humour and the city and fin de siècle Gothic narratives of work. His teaching specialisms are in Victorian and Edwardian popular literature, Gothic literature, masculinity, and modernity.